“The Future of Entertainment Is Online,” School Assembly Performers Fight for Footing
It is 8 o’clock on a Monday morning, and David Jack is preparing for a school performance in his home outside of Philadelphia. Nothing new. He has done thousands of these since he first started performing music in elementary school assemblies in 2000.
Except this educational show is 600 miles away in a rural town named Hazard, Kentucky. And no, Jack doesn’t have a plane to catch.
He just has to walk upstairs.
“That’s where my studio is,” Jack said. “I perform all my virtual shows from up there in the set I threw together myself.”
The set is simple. The camera sees a wall covered with slightly crooked brick wallpaper accented by a blue and orange LED light; a large flat-screen television hangs above a small black table for Jack to show videos during his program. Jack stands to the left, wearing all black. Multiple cameras and controls cover the small space, which allows Jack to share different forms of content, whether it be displays of scientific objects or everyday household items, easily as the show goes along.
Basic, but functional. Jack, 61 years old, taught himself how to work the technology to keep his business alive when the pandemic shuttered any possibility of an in-school performance
“But it’s still up to me to bring the magic,” Jack said.
Jack is one of the thousands of school performers across the country who attempt to teach through unconventional methods. Marionnettes in Massachusetts. Magicians in Michigan. A man in Vermont who sews 30-foot inflatable dinosaurs by hand.
And what they do must have an impact. After all, I am a student at Yale University and I still have a vial of soil that a science performer gifted me sitting on my bedroom shelf. My classmate still has a song from one of her elementary school performers on her playlist, and a former roommate can still describe the toy rings he earned from a performer over a decade ago.
I remember the thrill of the performance, filing into the cafeteria with hundreds of kids and screaming as loud as we could to be picked to be a part of the visiting act.
The coronavirus silenced those roaring crowds. Performers had their bookings canceled. While those like Jack were able to create an online show that brought in gigs, many others’ virtual
performances fell on deaf ears. Some quit the industry, and some are still unsure if there is a future in this work.
The work can be and has been lucrative. Performers may charge from $800 to $1500 before expenses for a 45-minute performance. They may do 10–20 performances a month.
But now many performers have to charge less for their online performances, and these lower price points could entice schools to continue keeping performances online if they keep them at all.
Schools use the performances to educate their students through more interactive methods and energize them for tests. But virtual performances might be harder to justify financially, as some are closer to the YouTube demonstrations found for free on the internet. To combat this online shift and gain more credibility, some performers are signing onto agencies.
Agencies bring multiple performers under their domain and offer the resources and competitive pricing of a network to potential schools. Performers are paid a salary, commission, or owe a consistent cut of their earnings to their agency.
To Ted Lawrence, a science performer in Vermont, agencies hurt solo operators attempting to scrap together their businesses.
“When doing online searches for school programs, results for little guys like me — folks who don’t book through agencies — no longer come up,” Lawrence said. “Most of my buddies have signed onto agencies who have managed to keep a presence on the top pages of Google.”
Agencies typically only scout and sign experienced talents, making it harder for young performers to enter the business. The startup cost is high. A performer has to formulate an original program, invest in the necessary equipment, and pay for marketing.
Bob Lisaius, a 63-year-old paleontology performer in Vermont, sees the result as dire:
“I just don’t see young people entering the industry like they used to,” Lisaius said., “With overhead cost and the internet offering free performances, it’s extremely hard to get started.”
Is the Sound Okay?
At 8:30, the Kentucky class joins Jack’s Zoom call. Silently. Jack can’t see the student’s faces. A webcam at the teacher’s desk shows the classroom from behind, only showing the backs of the kids’ heads as they look toward the board where Jack is projected.
Jack’s voice booms over the call:
“Teachers, we will be starting in one minute. We will be starting in one minute,” he says, camera off.
Suddenly, Jack’s camera bursts on, and he shouts a greeting to the students. For a brief moment, I am swept up in the enthusiasm I remembered from my criss-cross applesauce days.
But then reality sets in:
“Teachers, can you hear me okay?” Jack asked to a response of silence.
A sole thumbs-up pops into the chat. The students don’t move. Jack begins to guide the students through a 45-minute program about robots. He uses various methods to get his lessons across, from humorous conversations with a robotic character who appears on the television and interrupts him to ask questions to a Zoom call with a doctor showing one of the robotic arms she uses to conduct surgery. He gets responses from the students both visually and through the chat.
Jack created his online show in September 2020 after a school asked him if he had any virtual offerings. Before he opened his online offering, he was attempting to figure out what job he could get until retirement.
“When the pandemic hit, I thought this business was over,” Jack said.
Until the spring of 2020, Jack would average 15 to 20 school shows every month, with more during the holiday season. He had even hired a second performer to do hip-hop shows that encouraged good test preparation.
“To make it in this business, you have to be a man of all seasons,” Jack said.
So he diversified his offerings as his business grew through the early 2000s. He added shows without musical performances based on topics like robots or astronomy. The school industry is challenging, as Jack must create shows that are interesting to children and sellable to the adults who book and pay.
Before the pandemic required virtual performing, some schools couldn’t host a performer like Jack. He refers to these schools as being located in “performing deserts.” For reasons ranging from class sizes and performing space to geographic location, many rural schools weren’t able to hire an educational performer.
“Now, I can perform in rural Kentucky one day and in urban California the next,” Jack said.
When the Virtual Pitch Can’t Land
No customers called Lisaius when the pandemic arrived and shut down every school and library he typically performed at. And it left Lisaius with one takeaway: “I found out that society doesn’t really put value in what I do,” Lisaius said. “I love it, but maybe it doesn’t mean so much to the world.”
Since 1992, Over two million kids have seen Lisaius paleontology-based show. Before the pandemic, he would perform around 100 shows each year. But then the pandemic began.
“It has been a desert,” Lisaius said.
With no performances, Lisaius was relegated to assistance from the government for private contractors. Even with the aid, he estimates he lost around $200,000 in revenue.
A few performers he knew were taking their shows outdoors, but that didn’t work for him. The key to his performance is wheeling out three inflatable dinosaurs, which he uses as props to teach the history of dinosaurs.
“We have all seen the kid in the jumpy house go up in the air,” Lisaius said. “The conditions have to be just right for me to inflate the dinosaurs.”
Lisaius made around 30 virtual shows, but he doesn’t see them as a success. He sees his competition as National Geographic, and his budget isn’t quite as big as theirs.
“I can’t beat them from my house,” Lisaius said. “The magic in what I do is that I bring the dinosaurs to them in real life.”
Lawrence couldn’t generate enough interest in his online offering to make it financially viable. Schools told him they were only willing to pay $150 to $250 for an online program, which Lawrence concluded was too low to be worthwhile and would hurt his chances of raising his prices in the future.
And Lawrence worries that decision might have hurt his brand recognition, as he sent out pieces of mail to roughly 300 schools in Vermont at the beginning of this school year offering his in-person performance for half off at $500 and received only one response:
“One school secretary called me to reprimand me for wasting trees to send out junk mail,” Lawrence said, adding that his postcards were printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
Lisaius has been able to sell enough virtual programming to keep him afloat, but he cannot imagine sustainable success for his program without in-person performances. And he isn’t sure consistent in-person performances will ever be a reality due to vaccine hesitancy and the detection of the Omnicron variant of COVID-19.
“I’m 63,” Lisaius said. “Honestly, this life has been difficult. I love it, but I travel almost 40,000 miles a year.”
The Online Future of Performing
Cameron Zvara, a 27-year-old magician in Lansing, Michigan, first performed magic when he was 12 years old at a local restaurant one night a week.
He would go from table to table, turning playing cards into flowers for tips. He learned his tricks from magic books at the library and syndicated magic shows on public television. In college, he performed at parties, corporate events, and elementary and middle schools.
“It was an entertainment show,” Zvara said, “and my ultimate goal was to one day perform on cruise ships.”
Zvara wanted to be a prominent artist. The type with a full-time agent and a packed schedule of big venues across the country.
And then the coronavirus came along and changed his direction.
“I saw that schools, the places where I performed a lot in college and really cared about, were struggling,” Zvara said, “and I realized, I’m not just a magician. I can use magic and my ability to captivate crowds to teach.”
So when the schools shut down and his summer schedule of 150 in-person library shows was canceled, Zvara went to Ikea.
Why?
To buy cheap lights, of course. He had a studio to make.
He converted the second bedroom in his apartment into his stage. Purple and blue LEDs were placed behind decks of playing cards on shelves and on the ground facing upwards to illuminate the walls. A foam brick wall was put over the plain tan-painted back wall. Red curtains were drilled in to cover part of the bricks to make the space feel like a conventional theatre.
He invested thousands of dollars into multiple cameras and technology. With a click of a button, he could switch between cameras and put students’ video feeds onto the screen to have a conversation with him.
He decided to change the direction of his shows and began employing magic to illustrate the importance of reading and paying attention. He breaks the cardinal rule of magic by revealing exactly how he does certain tricks so that students can see the power of illusion and how it might affect them in the real world. He will even film shows in different locations, such as museums, parks, or other historical attractions to make his performances interactive field trips.
Zvara uses these visual and auditory techniques to have the kids participate in the show.
“Interaction is key to everything we do as performers,” Zvara said, “and virtual shows can make that extremely difficult.”
With every classroom’s Zoom feed on mute, Zvara can’t hear applause or adapt to students’ reactions the way he used to. Instead, he often has to rely on faraway fuzzy smiles, the silent contorting of mouths into laughter, or bored stares to dictate his pacing.
The pacing of virtual shows is much faster. In an in-person presentation, Zvara would complete eight tricks maximum. Every trick would involve a student participating, and Zvara could play off the kids’ reactions and questions to make each trick last several minutes.
“On the screen, I can go through the tricks without interruption,” Zvara said, “like boom, boom, boom, and we are done in 15 minutes.”
He has to slow things down to make the tricks stand out and the lessons stick.
“I’ll often bring up a single student on screen and talk to them about their day or their breakfast,” Zvara said. “That could take five minutes, but it’s worth it because it reminds them that I am real and present.”
His technique has worked. Unlike many school performers, Zvara has kept pricing for his virtual shows equivalent to the base price of an in-person production. And he is busier than ever, doing as many as five shows per day. Due to travel and setup times, he never could do that many shows in a single day in person.
Zvara notes that many of his colleagues are much older than him, but he isn’t worried about the future of his craft.
“There are 12-year-olds on Tik Tok doing magic tricks that are much more complex than anything I could do back then,” he said. “There will still be performers, but they might educate and entertain in different ways than the school assembly.”
Zvara is still tinkering with ways to make his show more modern and in line with the pacing and style of the content kids are consuming on social media platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram. He has started offering 10- and 15-minute programs to aid a teacher’s lesson rather than command their entire class time.
“Kids just don’t have the same attention span for online performances as they do in person,” Zvara said.
He doesn’t see his virtual shows going away if the pandemic goes away and schools begin booking in-person shows again.
“The future of entertainment is online,” Zvara said. “Two years ago, I would have told you good performances had to be done in person, but that just isn’t true anymore.”